About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

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The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.These are based on two very simple principles:Courtesy and Respect.Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym.Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Friday, 31 August 2018

Australia's Dysfunctional Democracy.

"Don't think of it as a hand on your shoulder, Malcolm. Think of it as a knife in your back." The ultimate beneficiary of the Liberal Party meltdown, Scott Morrison, is a deeply conservative evangelical Christian from one of Sydney’s leafiest suburbs. He replaces Turnbull largely because his name isn’t Peter Dutton – and because his face doesn’t remind the voting public quite so much of Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort! In policy terms, however, there is very little that distinguishes Morrison from his ultra-conservative colleagues.

NEW ZEALANDERS WATCHED, with mounting incredulity, the
meltdown of Australia’s Liberal-National coalition government. What unfolded
appeared to be driven almost entirely by a toxic mixture of personal
antipathies and oversized egos. Nowhere in the whole unedifying political saga
did the interests of the Australian people appear to get a look in.

Mind you, the Australian people had made it easy for Malcolm
Turnbull’s enemies. When questioned by the pollsters they had failed to draw a
sufficiently clear distinction between the Prime Minister and his increasingly
dysfunctional Party Room. Had they praised Malcolm Turnbull, and damned the
Liberal Party, then the cause of governmental integrity and stability might
have been strong enough to repel Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton and their reckless
co-conspirators.

As it was, the polls and a swag of dispiriting by-election
results in Queensland and elsewhere across Australia provided Abbott and Dutton
with the pretext they needed for a leadership spill. Never mind that the
declining popularity of the Liberals was almost entirely attributable to the
party’s conservative faction’s blank refusal to accept that most Australians
wanted nothing to do with their reactionary ideas.

Not even the decisive result of the informal plebiscite on
Gay Marriage was enough to convince them that they were out-of-touch with
mainstream Australia. They clung to the demonstrably false notion that “Real
Australians” were with them.

Though fantastical, this conservative conviction was
constantly reinforced by reactionaries in the news media. The views of a
decided minority of the Australian electorate were thus supplied with
amplification out of all proportion to their true demographic weight. As Dr
Goebbels discovered more than eighty years ago: a fantasy repeated often enough
will, eventually, take on the colour of reality.

Poor Malcolm Turnbull was, therefore, dammed if he did
attempt to reassert the liberalism implicit in his party’s name; and damned if
he didn’t. The deeply conservative ideology of the Liberal PM, John Howard, has
become practically ineradicable from Liberal Party ranks. Turnbull may have
been able to oust Abbot from The Lodge, but he could never muster the numbers
to oust the conservative faction’s racism, misogyny, homophobia and purblind climate
change denialism.

The ultimate winner of the Liberal Party leadership, Scott
Morrison, is a deeply conservative evangelical Christian from one of Sydney’s
leafiest suburbs. He replaces Turnbull largely because his name isn’t Peter
Dutton – and because his face doesn’t remind the voting public quite so much of
Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort! In policy terms, however, there is very little
that distinguishes Morrison from his ultra-conservative colleagues.

But, it is with these largely cosmetic considerations that
the Australian political system’s willingness to be guided by the wishes of the
electorate ends. The notion that the major political parties might still aggregate
and organise the interests of clear and readily comprehensible chunks of the
population: businessmen and professionals; shopkeepers and farmers; workers and
intellectuals; has long since ceased to correspond to any recognisable description
of political reality on either side of the Tasman.

To be fair, most of the voting public has enthusiastically
reciprocated the politicians’ lack of interest. Over the course of the past
30-40 years membership of political parties in both New Zealand and Australia
has plummeted. Most voters now draw little distinction between a Member of
Parliament and any other variety of highly-paid public servant. The crucial
democratic role which the people’s representatives are supposed to play is no
longer generally appreciated. As the unedifying spectacle of Malcolm Turnbull’s
deposition unfolded before their eyes over the third week in August, the
response of most Aussies was to angrily instruct MPs to: “Do your f***ing job!”

But, if the people are no longer sovereign – then who is?
It’s a tricky question. In the days of Robert Menzies or Rob Muldoon it was
pretty clear to everyone who ran the show. Nowadays, however, respect for the
party leader tends to last only as long as the polls remain favourable. But, when
public support falters, the most treacherous and ambitious politicians look in
the mirror and ask the oldest question is politics: “Why not me?”

The historical precedent, therefore, is not that of a
powerful monarchy like England or France, but of Poland or Scotland. Weak
kingdoms brought down by the unceasing intrigues and inveterate treachery of aristocrats
who cared more for themselves than they did for their country.

This essay was
originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday,
31 August 2018.

4 comments:

Normally I'd be rubbing my hands in glee to see a conservative party self immolate. Particularly one as right wing as the Australians'. Australia deserves better. But I also have some sympathy with people abandoning party membership. Why bother working your arse off to get someone elected, when they get most of their money from businesses and business people, and they essentially don't care about party members anymore. I've said this before but it bears repeating I have not been canvassed by any political party for years, except a couple of years ago once by phone. They believe with some justification, that they can better tell the way people are going to vote by looking at social media than going round to their houses and asking them.And if MPs are treated as just another highly paid public servant, that's pretty much what they are. They have become part of a political class that has very little to do with the people they are supposed to serve. I wonder how many of them send their kids to the local high school. Many years ago I remember talking to Fraser Coleman at a parents' evening. I guarantee this doesn't happen outside of the private system and Auckland Grammar or whatever these days.Mind you I also sort of feel a bit betrayed having stumped a bit for Mike Moore years ago to find that he was a secret wingnut libertarian or something. You begin to ask yourself "what's the point?" I think the point disappeared sometime round about 1984.